You Are Dumb, which is not a blog, posts new columns every weekday, except for most Tuesdays and the occasional fuckbotch. It is also a Twitter feed, @youaredumb, with content in a similar vein but much shorter. For a take on what a blog by me would be like, check out OLDNERD.

Memo to the Star-Tribune, Michele Bachmann, and Bobby Jindal: YOU ARE DUMB.

What's that, you say? There was a shooting this past weekend? And now cogent arguments about the role of marketing violent revolution in the public sphere are being met with wild claims about the shooter being a liberal by way of mentioning he read the Communist Manifesto? Seems like that's the kind of thing I would notice. Well, maybe I'll get to that kind of thing next week, but for all of our sanity, enjoy this shooting-free edition of IDIOTS SAY THE DAMNDEST THINGS!

"On the most divisive issues, Bachmann and Ellison -- both lawyers -- symbolize the opposing forces that will shape debate in the 112th Congress, articulating the concerns of voting blocs that could either embolden, or create headaches for, their party leaders." - The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, in an article titled, I shit you not, "Bachmann, Ellison personify wide political divide".

There is one carefully chosen word in that entire fucking quote. "Symbolize". Because they don't actually represent two equal distances from the political center. They're not actually a mirror image of each other. They just "symbolize" and "personify" the divide, because as we all know, there is no liberal equivalent to Michele Bachmann.

So why would the Strib say there is one? I think we all know the reason for that. The same reason they claim the losses by Blue Dog Democrats to Republicans represents a loss for centrism and moderatudinousness. Because they're fucking morons, brainwashed by the warped conventional wisdom that does not measure what things are, but only how close or far away they are from other things.

I wonder sometimes if these people even know what they eat, or, when grocery shopping, do they just pick the medium-sized box from the center of each aisle and eat half of it? And if so, maybe they're not lazy and stupid, maybe they just have rickets, gout, and scurvy.

"Until I was reading this snotty novel called 'Burr,' by Gore Vidal, and read how he mocked our Founding Fathers. And as a reasonable, decent, fair-minded person who happened to be a Democrat, I thought, 'You know what? What he's writing about, this mocking of people that I revere, and the country that I love, and that I would lay my life down to defend -- just like every one of you in this room would, and as many of you in this room have when you wore the uniform of this great country -- I knew that that was not representative of my country. And at that point I put the book down and I laughed. I was riding a train. I looked out the window and I said, 'You know what? I think I must be a Republican. I don't think I'm a Democrat.'" - Bachmann, proving my point.

This is what I'm talking about. This isn't a real story. It may be true (though I bet it isn't), but it's definitely not a real story.

Sane, reasoning human beings do not switch their political affiliations and philosophies because they disagree with a fictional portrayal of historical figures, even if the portrayal was written by a really gay, really liberal author. Also, sane, reasoning human beings do not talk to themselves on trains.

So Michele Bachmann may be insane, or she may have made up a ridiculously convoluted story to further her political career, or, most likely, both. In any case, she's special. In every sense of the word. And is thus not a fitting endpoint or marker for anything except the last stupid thing she's done.

"This report is partisan revisionist history at taxpayer expense, The report's assertion that the berms did not pass the commission's `cost benefit analysis' is insulting to the thousands of people whose way of life depends on the health of our working coast." - Bobby Jindal, pushing around giant piles of bullshit with bullshit-dozers.

Remember the BP oil spill? Remember how Bobby Jindal, in defiance of the federal bureaucracy, pushed up a bunch of giant fucking sand berms to save Louisiana? Well, it turns out the net effect of Jindal's sand-shoveling was just to the right of negligible, and wasted a shit-ton of money, according to the oil spill commission.

Note that aside from the phrase "revisionist history", Jindal doesn't actually say the commission was wrong. He says they were "partisan", and that them saying his scheme didn't work is insulting because a bunch of people would totally have benefited from it if it -had- worked.

Can we stop appointing commissions now? Leave fact-finding and investigations to scientists who might actually do something with the information besides reject it outright and use it as proof of your opponents' mendacity. Let's all agree that we're done pretending anyone cares about the facts. Might as well dismantle the Congressional Budget Office while we're at it. I understand we're trying to keep up appearances, but our marriage with reality is over, and pretending we're happy together is just going to mess our kids up even more.